Explaining the Current Anti-Vaccine Hysteria

In an X article titled "The Two Rituals: What Leviticus Knows About COVID, Fauci, and Measles in Lancaster County," physician Amesh Adalja considers events from the Covid pandemic to the current return of measles outbreaks to a nation that had once eliminated the disease. In doing so, he relates them to the current rise of anti-vaccine (and even anti-medicine) hysteria on the right.

His ancient starting point is startlingly apropos:

These are, on their face, two different problems. Leviticus 13 concerns an affliction of the body. Leviticus 16 concerns transgression against a deity. But both are impurity, both threaten the population, and both are the same leader's responsibility. What Leviticus offers is not a theory of disease but a system for handling contamination -- and that system has exactly two operations. Examine the afflicted, at length, and reach a determination about what they actually have. Or gather the pollution onto a designated carrier -- a scapegoat -- and drive it out. The second method is fast and requires no real objectivity. [bold added]

While one might regard bringing up scapegoating as the prelude to a defense of Anthony Fauci, such a conclusion would be only partly correct, for Fauci is just one of the scapegoats in the analysis, which goes on to explain how vaccination and even the entire field of medicine ended up also being scapegoated.

Along the way, Adalja also looks at what each of our nation's political tribes got wrong in their responses by choosing the second, easier ritual and the unanimity/illusion of certainty it provides:

The refusal [by lockdown proponents] to consider risk stratification, risk calculation, and harm reduction was a failure. The honest answer to COVID-19 would produce different guidance for different people -- and different guidance is unusable to anyone who needs a universal rule. The immunocompromised patient deserved a real conversation about their specific residual risk and the additional tools available to them. What they got instead was conscription into an argument about everyone else's behavior.

The mirror image runs the other way. The disease is no worse than the flu. The vaccine does not work, or works so briefly it doesn't count. The vaccine's harms are catastrophic and concealed. And doing nothing costs nothing at all.

This is not inquiry, which would be welcome. What happened instead was that every one of the four questions above was answered in advance by a conclusion already held, and the answers moved as needed to protect it.

The four unasked questions?

1. How dangerous is the disease (does it cause death, hospitalization, healthcare utilization?) and to whom?
2. How well do the medical countermeasures (treatments, vaccines, post-exposure prophylaxis) work, if any are available? And for whom?
3. What does the medical countermeasure strategy cost?
4. What is the cost of inaction?

But Trump started the lockdowns! you might correctly remember. Adalja addresses that and explains why the right has memory-holed that fact and why vaccination was ripe for scapegoat status:

I have written elsewhere about where the anti-vaccine movement's epistemology came from -- the postmodern critique of scientific authority, the flattening of expertise, the treatment of consensus as a species of power. That genealogy explains how people acquired the confidence to disbelieve expert claims. It does not explain why vaccines became the object. Nobody organizes against statins. Nobody holds rallies about dialysis.

The answer, I think, is that vaccination is the one medical intervention routinely justified to the patient as an obligation to other people. Get it to protect the immunocompromised. Get it for your grandmother. Get it for herd immunity. Every other intervention in medicine is offered on the grounds that it will help you. This one, uniquely, is pitched as something you owe.

That framing is well-intentioned and largely true. It is also precisely what made vaccination available to a critique about bodies being conscripted for collective ends. When a field argues its case in the language of what you owe the collective, it should not be surprised when someone predisposed to see medicine as social control finds the evidence in its own words. And there is a second cost: by making the case in terms of what you owe others, public health left the benefit to you underemphasized for decades. [bold added]

In addition to noting how this messaging made vaccines ripe for goat status, Adalja explains why this eventually happened -- in short, because scapegoating doesn't really work.

I am not sure I have done the piece justice here, but I hope I will have motivated someone to see how Adalja ties this all together, and manages to explain how so many people who seemed to understand the value of vaccination five minutes ago are now its hysterical opponents.

There is lots to unpack here, but this is the kind of knowledge it will take to fight for the selfish value of vaccination and medicine.

-- CAV

Four Random Things

A Friday Hodgepodge

1. Fans of the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile will be delighted to know that they can track the current and future whereabouts of the fleet via WhereMyDogs@.

2. Alison Green has begun posting lists of past Ask a Manager posts on Fridays. Recently, the title, "Toll Collectors, Fear of Being Set on Fire, and Other Things We Believed About Work When We Were Kids" caught my eye. My favorite from the post was the first, on what someone thought firing was as a toddler:

When I was 4 or 5, I tended to take most things literally. So I thought getting fired meant that if you were bad at your job, you were taken out of the building and set on fire as a punishment.

This one is good from top to bottom, and the stories are short and sweet.

3. If you like the tech news aggregator site, Hacker News, you might also like the Bubbles site, which does a similar ranking of personal blogs.

A couple of short posts I bumped into recently illustrate that there's no telling what you'll find there on a given day: "Gulf of America. Lake America" and "This Guy Made an ASCII Cyberpunk City Using HTML and JavaScript."

I was tempted to embed the video of the city, but I'll recommend you stop by Kai Gulliksen's blog, instead.

4. If you've ever wondered What do insanely wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about?, someone who "attract[s] these people into my life" has a somewhat lengthy, but very interesting answer.

The answer considers four levels of personal wealth and looks at each, with one example of a thing billionaires buy (in an indirect sense) being access:

You now can just ask your staff to contact anyone and you will get a call back. I have seen this first hand and it is mind-blowing the level of access and respect $1 billion+ gets you. In this case, I wanted to speak with a very well-known billionaire businessman (call him billionaire #1 for a project that interested billionaire #2. I mentioned that it would be good to talk to billionaire #1 and B2 told me that he didn't know him. But he called his assistant in. "Get me the xxxgolf club directory. Call B1 at home and tell him I want to talk to him." Within 60 minutes, we had a call back. I was in B1's home talking to him the next day. B2's opinion commanded that kind of respect from a peer...

The end of the answer was sad, but very good in the sense of providing a reminder, much needed in today's culture of envy, that billonaires are human beings, and face adversity just like the rest of us.

-- CAV

A Better Way to Talk About ...

... Etiquette, Vaccination, and More

Twice yesterday, I encountered two of my favorite commentators urging a more self-interested discussion of two things America would do much better with more of: etiquette and vaccination.

Both were a breath of fresh air, but I'll start with the one that mildly surprised me, although it really shouldn't have.

Miss Manners takes a question from someone who by chance observed an acquaintance being extremely rude in a store.

The questioner looked away, but may not have escaped detection, and so wondered if a greeting was in order.

Unlike so many who would have probably said something about sparing the acquaintance embarrassment, Miss Manners advises sparing oneself:

As you were not the one who misbehaved, there is no etiquette rule preventing you from greeting your friend with a cheerful smile. But Miss Manners does feel that your solution is both more tactful and less exhausting, as you were then spared the explanation that would no doubt have followed about why she thought her rude behavior was justified by the part you did not see.

Yes!

That would be tiresome, on top of being awkward and unpleasant. While it does comport with my typical inclinations, it's nice to have that underscored with an explicit connection to the real value of etiquette: That it helps us lead our own lives more smoothly.

Less surprising, but wonderful to see coming from a highly visible and respected national figure is a recent comment by epidemiologist Amesh Adalja about how people discuss the subject of vaccination.

Around the 16:30 mark of his podcast,in Adalja starts by criticizing a pro-vaccination op-ed that relied on the idea that we are all our brothers' keepers, backing himself with research concerning what motivates people to get vaccinated. Older adults found arguments based on preserving their own independence more persuasive, for example. Adalja's own framing is in part:

"Vaccines are a technology that lets an individual live in a world full of infectious disease threats. They free you from worry... [T]hey make that risk much more manageable. ... They're increasing your freedom of action...

I completely agree with him that the brother's keeper argument is missing a highly persuasive reason to get jabbed.

Sane people -- who are the only ones worth reaching out to, anyway -- want to improve their own lives. That sounds like a much brighter and less frustrating starting point for any discussion than anything else to me.

-- CAV

Dolly Parton, RIP

I am not a country music fan, and I was not that familiar with Dolly Parton's work. But even I had heard enough about her intelligence and self-reliance to respect her.

In that vein, I highly recommend George Will's column about Parton's passing. It captures both her strong character and the once-healthier (albeit far from perfect) culture of America around the time she was born.

I especially enjoyed learning about her lone professional encounter with Elvis Presley (of whom I not a fan):

She was a savvy businesswoman even when getting started in Nashville's music industry, which was not a lagoon of advanced thinking about the emancipation of women. In 1974, she was 28 and starstruck when Elvis Presley expressed interest in meeting her and recording "I Will Always Love You," which she had written. But when Presley's management insisted on at least half the rights to the song, she refused, the meeting was off, and she never met -- never again wanted to meet -- Elvis. But Ackmann reports that Parton said keeping the copyright to that one song made her enough money -- perhaps $10 million -- she could have bought Graceland, Elvis's Memphis home.

Will also captures the good and the bad of Parton's cultural background in a couple of places, although I am not sure he'd agree with my evaluation of the latter.

Just ahead of the above excerpt, Will notes the commonality of self-reliance in America at the time of Parton's birth:

Her family knew the old story of a cheerful preacher saying to a hardscrabble farmer, "This is a right nice place you and [the] Lord have here," and the farmer replying, "You should have seen the som'bitch when the Lord had it hisself."

Good! Some prosperity gospel types should hear that one, but I digress.

As a fellow Southerner of Parton's, I see what Will means about allocation of status and respect and would add that it isn't just a sensitive topic for the uneducated. But as I see it, this concern often borders on defensiveness:

[Biographer Martha] Ackmann says that, as a child, Parton heard, early and often, this phrase: "Don't get above your raisin'." Meaning, don't get too big for your britches. Most of all, don't forget where you came from. [bold added]

That kind of advice is a two-edged sword at best, and reminds me things I got growing up.

Sure. See the good in your background and don't let the stereotypes of others cause you to forget your own worth or the good you saw around you when you were young. But don't just take that culture uncritically, like too many of the people who give such advice seem to want.

Based on her self-emancipation as a woman, while boldly putting herself out there, I would say Dolly Parton got that largely right.

-- CAV

J.D. Vance is a Huey P. Long Fanboi

The Republican Party of the future is not going to be the party of Milton Friedman. We're going to enjoy spitting on his grave, metaphorically speaking. -- J.D. Vance

***

The Committee to Unleash Prosperity -- which is what we need for every man a king -- to come true has done the dirty work for anyone who might be wondering who this Huey Long dude -- who's suddenly all over the place -- is.

After all, J.D. Vance, Trump's de facto successor in the Republican Party, just publicly held him to higher esteem (to put it mildly) than Milton Friedman as indicated by the quote above.

The Committee includes a photo linking to video and transcript of Louisiana's autocratic former governor and senator laying out his socialistic Share Our Wealth plan, with an excerpt beneath.

Here's a sample:

I propose a limitation on how big a fortune can get and a limitation on how little a fortune can get ...

A capital levy tax to be levied -- the first one million not to be taxed except as it is now taxed; and the second million to be taxed 1%; the third million 2%; the fourth million 4%; the fifth million 8%; the sixth million 16%; the 7th million 32%; the eighth million 64%; the ninth million 100%. That means that no man with that tax levied against him every year can possess a fortune of more than from 3 to 4 to 5 million dollars to any one man ...

How many men ever went to a barbecue and would let one man take off the table what's intended for 9/10ths of the people to eat. The only way you'll ever be able to feed the balance of the people is to make that man come back and bring back some of that grub he ain't got no business with ...

I agree that this sounds like Bernie Sanders, but it's worse. The delivery is slick -- skillfully focusing on envy to help his audience forget that the wealthy earned their money by trade that also improved their customers' fortunes; and imagine that stealing is okay, so long as the victim has more than the thief.

He makes his theft sound noble, and redistribution generous.

This is who Vance admires, and fortunately doesn't have the charisma to match.

I have asked this before and will ask it again of anyone holding out the Republicans as an alternative (let alone a superior one) to the Democrats: What would it take for you to concede that there is no longer a difference?

Vance is as bad on the merits as any Democrat, and worse by virtue of the common, increasingly wrong belief that the Republicans are "better for the economy" than the Democrats -- who are also much worse than they used to be.

-- CAV

Drones: Grounded Harder Than You Think

John Stossel's latest column -- and video, which I'm embedding below -- are worth your time and are both incredible for two very different reasons.

Let's start with the positive side of the ledger. Stossel's six minute video will be an eye-opening demonstration (or reminder) of the potential for this new and rapidly evolving technology to improve our lives.

"Companies like Wing and Zipline bring people hot meals in under 10 minutes. I had to watch it to believe it." -- John Stossel

Even though the technology is relatively new, and many people remain unfamiliar with it, enough people are that market feedback has led to impressive improvements. People who grouse about propeller noise, for example, may be surprised at how quiet some of the newer models are, if they notice them at all.

On to the negative side of the ledger: As amazing as this technology is, the sheer obduracy of the regulatory state is giving it a run for the money. Stossel touches on this a couple of times:

Drone delivery was supposed to be common years ago. Jeff Bezos told 60 Minutes he expected Amazon to be sending out drone deliveries by 2017.

But most of us still don't have it. Why?

And later:

President Donald Trump hopes to speed that process. He signed an executive order telling the FAA to fast-track drone deliveries by allowing drones to fly beyond line of sight.

But he did that more than a year ago. Government is, as usual, so slow! The FAA didn't even respond to Trump's order for months.

If you think that's bad, this is on top of something I commented on nearly eight years ago:

The President who wanted to remove two old regulations for every new one recently signed into law the FAA Reauthorization Act, which repeals an old statutory exemption from FAA rules for model aircraft, such as drones. The new law will take some time to take effect...

What happened to that? is just about all I can say. Unlike today, that was one of the few times the President bothered to involve the legislature in an attempt to affect a policy. It would seem to have had absolutely no effect.

Considering this in very general terms, I'd say this may be a case of things being earlier than you think on a front for the battle for freedom. This President has no principles and never bothers to articulate why he wants to achieve anything. As a result, he has blown two opportunities to build momentum for a much-needed revision of a policy that is crippling a new sector of the economy. And that sector, as we are seeing in Ukraine and the Middle East -- and can thus easily imagine -- has national security implications.

And yes, China is already way out in front of us.

-- CAV

Four Nifty Things

A Friday Hodgepodge

Editor's Note: I will be recovering from a minor medical procedure next week and will not be blogging, although I will probably post on X/Twitter most days. I plan to be back here on August 24.

***

1. Some time ago, I encountered a kitchen gadget site called the Blind Kitchen, which I used to give my wife gift ideas for Christmas that year.

One such gift was this wide-mouthed funnel, which is excellent for transferring hot food and liquids into thermoses. It's faster, eliminates messes, and prevents scalded fingers.

2. When using thermoses for lunches, I like to add hot water to them for a few minutes before the food, so as to conserve the heat in the food.

One day, I remembered a small appliance a grad school friend used for keeping hot water handy for tea, and realized that would save time in the morning and make it easier to enjoy tea later in the day. Based on excellent reviews, I purchased a three liter Zojirushi water boiler/warmer.

I just fill it first thing in the morning, plug it in, and set the desired temperature. In less than half an hour, I have all the near-boiling water I need available when I want it for the rest of the day.

3. Another item I learned about from the Blind Kitchen, but couldn't find there later was a meat chopper similar to this one.

I'd never seen or heard of these before, but I bought one.

It's low-level amazing how much faster, easier, and more effective this is than the end of a spatula on the way to producing a uniform texture when cooking ground meat.

4. Stymied by an impenetrable wall of AI agents which kept telling me to do the same (ineffective) thing when I needed to gain access to one of my online accounts, I recalled a site I can't believe I've never mentioned here before: GetHuman.

This site tells you how to reach an actual human at a business of your choice.

I was on hold for about fifteen minutes, but we were able to fix the very odd and rare problem with my particular account.

-- CAV